Passion Chypre

L'Atelier Möbius

Passion Chypre in its wooden case. The packaging puts Western luxury brands to shame. Photo: LT

One of the first stands I visited at Notes Shanghai was L’Atelier Möbius. What caught my nerdy eye on passing was a rotary evaporator, a decent-sized piece of chemistry lab equipment at the back of the stand, busy turning and bubbling to remove solvent from some extract. I fell into conversation with Lorenzo and soon asked him to show me his craziest perfume. A few seconds later I had under my nose the most outrageous composition since the original Gucci Rush (1999), possibly even since Angel (1992). I know this because I have to go back that far in time to find a fragrance that caused me to instantly laugh out of pure delight, without any thought required.

Passion Chypre is not a chypre, or if it is, the rest of the chypre accord is vestigial. It is, however, most definitely a passionfruit composition of such intensity that it goes past its intended imitative target and into unknown territory. I must warn my readers that while delightful, PC may be the least obviously “wearable” perfume in a long while.¹ If no occasion currently warrants wearing it, we must create one. Nothing fancy, just something like a Fifth Element themed masked ball; a guided tour of the place on the moon where Orlando Furioso’s sanity was stored in a stoppered phial; or perhaps a psychedelic retreat in a Divina Commedia theme park.

In the interview, Lorenzo explains that he had an epiphany while on honeymoon in France, when he was served a scoop of passionfruit on top of a scoop of chocolate ice cream. He then bought from a posh grocery in Paris all the different types of passion fruit, identified the varietal he liked best, and set about reconstructing it. I share his love, since on a trip to Thailand I bought a kilo of passionfruits and left them in a bowl to ripen, whereupon the hotel room smelled so good that I fell in love and have ever after vainly tried to re-create that feeling with the lower quality fruit found in Europe.

Passionfruit headspace apparently contains a number of heavy fruity esters and some sulfuraceous molecules. Lorenzo’s version seems based on Oxane, a hugely powerful sulfur-containing heterocyclic odorant with wonderfully incoherent character descriptors, such as “galbanum, earthy, lettuce, tropical, cabbage.”² I think he added some opaque, powdery-coconutty lactones, citrus materials to convey the acidity, and fruity macrocyclic musks. Up close, it says passionfruit, of course, but also effervescent multivitamin tablets (with B1 for the sulfur) and burnt matches.

There is a pure effect of scale that contributes to the delight of Passion Chypre. If you have stood in front of a Chuck Close giant portrait or a Claes Oldenburg monster rubber stamp you will recognise the feeling. PC’s fruit is so large that you can see the grain of its skin, and wonder whether it could accidentally flatten you. What Lorenzo has done is show up the little niche perfumery tropes, all the cherry- and geosmin-powered one liners. Served up as provocative, they were half-hearted, apologetic rebellions. Passion Chypre is a total surprise, a euphoric Pop Art perfume, the first of its kind, a unique work of art.

1. Tania complains that she can taste it for hours after I sprayed it.

2. Apparently someone at Quest International (now part of Givaudan) spilled 100g of oxane into the drains of its Ashford facility thirty years ago, and all of Kent mysteriously smelled of tropical fruit for a week.